Throughout October, the Reboot Your Life project has taught us all about how important good sleep is for mind and body. So a couple of my editors here (real bright sparks) thought it would be a good idea to flip the script.

Eliza was great. She spends the whole night either monitoring people who are sleeping, or helping people who are trying not to sleep stay awake. If anyone in the sleep dep study starts to nod off, she sings to them over the PA. Song of choice: Green Day's Wake Me Up When September Ends. She reckons she's done 1,000 studies like the one she did on me.

Anyway, the electrode glue was super uncomfortable—whenever I moved it ripped my chest hair out. It took me three or four hair washes to get it out of my hair the next morning.

At first I was excited, and everything ran smoothly. The first set of tasks they got me to do lasted about 10 or 15 minutes each.

I started to realise what I'd got myself into when it came to the driving test; an hour-long driving simulation set on a country road at night. A dark, lonely country road. Occasionally you come up behind a truck and have to brake.

And that's it. That's all that happens. For an hour.

It's way more boring than actually driving. It's intense. The controls are crap—the steering wheel doesn't steer properly, and the pedal is unresponsive. You struggle to keep the car on the road.

Motivation plays an interesting role in performance. Driving a simulator at 2:00am, I was way less motivated to drive well than I would've been if I was actually driving a car. I started to think, "Why do I care, it's just a test." Which is a terrible attitude, but hey, it was two in the morning.

Sleep deprivation has a much bigger impact than I thought it did, especially on tasks that require a lot of concentration.